Another Phoebe-ismOh, oh, but y’know, you always see these really beautiful women with these really nothing guys, you could be one of those guys.

1. The practical theory of relativity – Those guys are really “nothing guys”. They just look like “nothing guys” because they are with these awe”some” women!and usually, if you like the girl, you are better off believing that she made a wrong choice!2. An analogy I use – “Just because their is a goalkeeper on the goalpost, that does not mean you stop shooting at the goal” and “Just because you are a goalkeeper, that does not mean you cannot score goals”3. Another MBA quip – Everyone who graduates out of the IIMs in this country, wants to replace the CEO of his company. Their hopes are high, but hopes from them… low! (Unhe badi umeed hoti hai, lekin unse.. badi kam!)4. Norman Vincent Peale – with due apologies to all his lovers.. all those who have seen small town book shops at the bus-stations lined up with titles like “Dont say yes when you want to say no”, “You can be a winner” and blah and bah.. This Phoebe-ism is definitely inspired by that. I mean, come on! There are these losers going out with these babes! But they are not complete losers like Chandler 😉 They have cars, money, or girlfriends who think with something that’s kinda below the knees.5. A phrase I love – Night is always darkest before the dawn.

Like this:

I just realized that in my friend circle (especially the IIMB one), a lot of us have this habit of cracking one liners from friend. And I thought I should pay homage to Friends through this episodic writing on some of the most amazing one-liners I’ve seen people pick.

Phoebe has a knack of cracking phenomenally universally applicable statements like this one –

I didn’t have anything on that topic, so I went another way. (Context: Season 1 – Ep. 6 -The One With the Butt…. Chandler narrating the story of his date with the Italian girl Aurora who is married to Rick and has another boyfriend Ethan and the “friends” are discussing about the uncomfortable feeling around going out with someone who is going out with someone else. Joey cracks the landmark – When I’m with a woman, I need to know that I’m going out with more people than she is )

What does that remind me of?

1. ACP – Arbit Class Participation – a phenomenon that every MBA has definitely been through, and especially in courses where faculty members/professors have additional weightage for participating in class discussions. People come up with such garbage CP as “In the multidimensional and prospective interest of the economy, its important for organizations to add value to the pet allowance of the third strata of economically imprudent and strategically deprived dogs sleeping in the garbage cans of south mumbai.” (Background questions could have been something as simple as “Do you think Maneka Gandhi and her animal activism is the way to go?”This ACP reminds me 2 more things – First, A2Z CP where people had explanations of A to Z of CP, e.g. BCP – before class participation, CCP- creative class participation, DCP – Desperate class participation and so on.And the second was bullCP – where backbenchers would float 5 random keywords which had to combined in a single participation – whoever does that successfully, gets to float the next set of keywords. Example – Intoxicating, Aliens, Titan, Paradigm Shift, Professor – There are organizations known to have made paradigm shifts in their strategy without realizing any benefit because a bad strategy could make a customer feel like an alien, say something like customers perceiving Titan not as a brand of watches but as a company that is disposing intoxicating wastes in space simply because they agreed to a professor’s suggestion of coming up with a brand called Titan WaistLine. Beat that!

2. Wheel of Fortune – and hence, Shilpa. I have associated WoF with a random turn of wheel leading to a random topic on which someone asks questions, etc. Shilpa has a knack for that – On a table where strong discussions on credit cards is happening, she can end up asking a question like – who killed Lala Lajpat Rai.

3. The way people live their life – like defeated warriors. I could not change the tide of things, so I decided to do something else. I tried a couple of times, but realized that I cant change this. So I decided to do something else.

4. The need to be counted- A lot of people have this problem. I have that. I feel a little left out when I dont have anything to say on a topic. Either I try to paraphrase. Or, I go back to the drawing board and learn something new. But most of the people have an urge to be counted.

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